Craft Room Update

My walls are painted and the floor is going in!  I chose an engineered bamboo floor.  It's engineered because it is going on a basement floor.  I chose bamboo because it is a sustainable hardwood.  I also really love the color!

More pictures when it is finished!

Craft Room Progress

I've been looking through my pictures, but they are a little disorganized since my video camera that also takes photos was date stamping everything in the wrong month and year. In any case, here is a picture of the upcoming craft room. This is the earliest picture I can find. To the right is a bank of closets. Sadly only one of them will be a craft closet--the rest will be devoted to kids clothing and other storage.

All those boxes? Crafting supplies I've not been able to get at for some time now. The mattress the baby will use was also in there. This room is pre-insulation.

Below you can see the insulation is up and we're ready to pass electrical and duct work inspections.


Now the drywall is up and they've begun to mud and tape.


Another view of the closets.

Looking into the craft room from the outside. We opted for double french doors to provide as much natural light in this room as possible. Sadly I've only got the one small window and it sits next to the steps from the sliding glass door upstairs--so we can't make it bigger without affecting the patio.

We started priming the walls in the basement. My sweet daughter tried painting the wall below. I had paint swatches up (which fell down) and she was painting all around them.

That's her Dora knee pad we picked up at Home Depot. She wanted to get into the garden with me. We found it helps knees when doing low cut-in painting.

Spring Cleaning and Organizing

I don't know what it is, but I find the older I get, the more I need lists and labels. (Could it be I'm just getting older?)

In any case, I love both my vinyl cutter and my label maker (for those tiny labels I can't possibly ever cut and pick without losing my sanity). I love having a home for each thing I own (I'm not there yet, but I can dream), and having it clearly labeled so no one can get confused at where an item belongs.

The pocket finds jar, by the way, is for my laundry room. I often go through pockets (too many melted crayons in my past experience) and pull items out that don't belong there. You'd be amazed what each of us leaves in our pockets. All finds go into the jar, and I don't have to worry about it. If someone is wondering where an item went--check the jar. Makes my life just that much easier.

And so it's April and if you haven't already, I challenge you to do some spring cleaning and organizing. I'm personally going to challenge myself to get rid of at least 1 item a day for two weeks. And I'm going to go back to my already organized areas and retidy them. I'll try and post some pictures. We are trying to grow our garden too, so I'll let you know how that goes.

Wish me luck! (And good luck to you too).

I'm back!

Wow, what a whirlwind summer! We put our house on the market, visited family, moved to another state and moved back (yep, we moved back). In any case I'm home and I have some fun ideas to share.

Hope you had a great summer too!

And since it's back to school time, here's a fun wall Jodee did for her son's room. (She used two layers of vinyl for the effect).


Oh, and in case you were wondering, here's how the bathroom turned out.

Moving Update

Well, the house is nearing completion for getting it on the market. We had to basically do a master bathroom remodel since our grout went bad and it rotted the wallboard behind it. We had to rip it down to the studs and start over. We were told we can't put the house on the market with a major problem like that, so we had to take care of it first. So much fun!

Thankfully we're almost done with that. So a word of warning. If you have a tile shower, you should know the grout needs to be resealed every so many years--frequency depends upon how often the shower is used. It's pretty inexpensive to do, and it will save you the headache that we had.

Oh, and if you are blessed with a 1980's pink tub like we were, you can have it resurfaced/reglazed for under $500--even if it is jetted. In our case this was the cheaper option than having a new tub put in.